The care of the dead.

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THE CARE

OF

THE DEAD

-£>e-s^

L 0 N 1) o X :
Eyke an-d Spottiswoode, Ltd.

1916.

Walter Clinton Jackson Library

The University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Special Collections & Rare Books

World War I Pamphlet Collection

THE CARE

OF
THE DEAD

London:
Eyre and Spottiswoode, Ltd,

1916.

Digitized by tine Internet Arciiive

in 2010 witii funding from

Lyrasis IVIembers and Sloan Foundation

http://www.archive.org/details/careofdeadOOunse

1.

In a graveyard west of Vimy there
are buried 1 ,320 French soldiers and more than
600 Enghsh. The earth is bare on most of
the Enghsh graves ; the French ones are older,
but all are cared for alike by the Englishman
now in charge of the place. " We leave you
our trenches and our dead," a French officer
said to an English one when our army took
over this part of the line, and both parts
of the trust are discharged with a will.

What this means for the French, one feels
when one sees the visits of French soldiers'
friends to their graves. The other day a
French woman in deep mourning came here
with a handful of white flowers to place upon
one of these. Probably it was her son's,
for she was not young. While she was ar-
ranging them at its head, there came into
the cemetery one of the usual little bareheaded
processions — a N.C.O. showing the way ;
then an English chaplain with his open book ;

./• (37)1701

then, on a stretcher, the body sewn up in
a brown army blanket, a big Union Jack
lying over it ; then half a dozen privates
looking as Englishmen do at these moments
— a little awkward, but simply and sincerely
sorry. As they passed the French woman
she rose and then, evidently moved by some
impulse which shyness made it difficult to
follow, fell in at the rear of the procession,
with some of the flowers still in her hand.
When I next saw them, the men were standing
round the new grave, the chaplain was reading
aloud, " dust to dust " and " ashes to ashes, '
and the woman, a few yards away, was kneeling
on the ground. The service over, and the
rest turning away, she came close to the
grave, dropped the white flowers in, and
went back to the other grave empty handed.

One knew, though the woman could not,
how all this would be told to the dead
Englishman's comrades ; and one felt the
truth of Sir Douglas Haig's saying, that a
kind of work which " does not directly con-
tribute to the successful termination of the

war ' may still " have an extraordinary moral
value to the troops in the field, as well as
to the relatives and friends of the dead at
home." But for the work of the Army's
Graves Registration Units, this little scene
and many other scenes equally binding,
in their degree, to the friendship of England
and France could scarcely have taken place.
After the French Army had left this district,
the French soldier's grave might not have
been taken care of, perhaps could not have
been even known to be his ; the Englishman
might have been buried under cover of night
in some vacant space near the firing-trench,
and all trace of the grave blown away next
day by a shell. To know the full worth
of what these units are doing now, one needs
to see first what the state of things was in
the first months of the war.

In those days a man was commonly
buried close to the place where he fell.
Wherever hard fighting had been, in France
or Belgium, the eye of the traveller along
the roads is struck by many low crosses

sticking out of the ground — in the fields, in
cottage gardens, in corners of farmyards and
orchards, even on roadside strips of grass.
Where the ground has changed hands a
good deal in the course of the war, you may
see, within a few hundred yards of each
other, the gabled and eaved cross of the
Germans, with " Hier ruht m Gott and a
name painted white on a dark ground, the
beaded wire wreath of the French, with its
" Requiescat " or " Mort pour la France,"
and the plain-lined cross of the English,
white or light brown or just the unpainted
wood, " In lovmg memory " of one or more
officers or men. Even now a good many of
these isolated memorials are raised. The very
position of some of them is eloquent. Near
Fricourt, on what used to be No Man s
Land till we won it this summer, a number
of crosses, all of the English sort and inscribed
in English, stand to the honoured memory
of "an unknown French soldier, two

unknown French soldiers," " six unknown
French soldiers, here buried." Here, when

our troops took the German front line on the
1st July, it was one of their first cares to bury
the French comrades who fell while holding
this part of the front during the winter, whose
bodies could not be retrieved at the time of
their death, from under the fire of German
machine-guns, and, when recovered at last,
were beyond all chance of identification.
Near La Boisselle, again, is a cross inexpertly
made of two pieces of lath, and lettered in
pencil : " In loving memory of 2nd Lieut. X.,

Regiment, killed here, July 1st, 1916."

It stands scarcely ten feet in front of the line
from which our army advanced on that morn-
ing. You feel, when you see it, the thrill
of the first moment of the long battle of the
Somme — the subaltern giving the word to
his men, and himself springing first out of
the trench, and falling almost at once, and
the men pressing on.

That is a special case of a grave on a site
more monumental than Westminster Abbey
itself. A few such graves, and some part
of the trenches near them, will probably

8

be preserved for ever by village communes
or private owners of land, as memorials and
relics of the great war. But not every man
can be buried just where he falls. As a
rule, the spot remains under fire for some
time after his death. Even if it could be
done, and the history of the war be left
written in this way on the face of the country-,
— a long dotted line of graves representing
a trench, a cluster of graves a skirmish, a
dense constellation a battle — the record would
not be durable. France could not fence off
a strip of country 300 miles long and many
miles wide, and keep it up as a historical
museum. And nothing else could preserve
all the graves, or most of them. Some would
be treasured and tended, as they are now, by
farmers and cottagers. Others would soon
be lost sight of. In a few months the earth
of a newly made grave sinks in, the cross
falls awry, and may split, the writing on it is
weathered away. Unless something is done,
and done promptly, every trace of an out-
lying grave may be gone in a year. That is

what might have happened to thousands of
British and French soldiers' graves if an
Englishman, full of goodwill and energy, had
not noticed the danger in time, and stepped in,
with a few like-minded friends, to avert it.

How the work was begun, and how it has
grown, may next be described.

II.

In the autumn of 1914, the necessity for
a continued organization to undertake the
supervision of graves was recognised, both
from the point of view of national feeling,
and to discourage the disconnected and spas-
modic efforts of private individuals, which
were threatening to create friction and con-
fusion. The services of Mr. Fabian Waro,
who, while employed under the British Red
Cross with French troops, had already m-
terested himself in the subject, were obtamed
by the Army, and, later, this gentleman was
granted a commission in order to supervise
the department of which he is now Director.

10

It was not until March, 1915, that the or-
ganization of the Commission of Graves
Registration and Enquiries finally assumed its
present shape.

Under the Directorate are the Graves
Registration Units in the different spheres
of military activity. In France and Belgium
there are four of these units, each v^ith their
tw^o or three sections. Three of the four
units divide the British front betv/een them,
from north of Ypres to the Somme battle-
field. The fourth unit deals with everything
outside and behind the beats of these three.
When an officer or man is killed at the front,
or dies of wounds, his burial is at once re-
ported to the Director as well as to the base.
If killed in action, he may still be buried,
in the old way, somewhere near the trench.
If so, the chaplain or officer who buries him
reports the position of the grave, and one
of the officers of the Graves Registration
Units visits it, verifies the record, affixes,
if necessary, a durable cross, with the date,
the man's name, rank, regiment and regi-

II

mental number upon it, clearly stamped on
aluminium tape, and enters these particulars
and the exact site of the grave in the register.
But this mode of burial is becoming much
less common. The Army has been quick
to realise the desirability of burying its dead
in the nearest of the 300 or more recognised
cemeteries behind the line. The bodies are
carried back by road or light railway to one
of the little wooden, iron, or canvas mor-
tuaries which the Graves Registration Units
have set up in the cemeteries. There the sol-
diers in charge of the cemetery do all that
remains to be done, and an eye-witness can
assure the friends of soldiers at home that
there is nothing perfunctory about these
funerals. Everything is done as tenderly and
reverently as if the dead man were in an
English churchyard among themselves.

When a death takes place in a hospital,
there is, of course, a regular cemetery at hand,
and registration is simple.

Some of the cemeteries are great exten-
sions of little' village graveyards. Some were

12

begun by special corps or divisions, which
wished to bury their dead all together. In one
you find a separate plot, each with its special
entrance, for Gurkhas, Sikhs and Punjabis.
Under the great trees of another, where are
many of those who fell at Festhubert, some of
our Indian soldiers have built, for their com-
rades, brick tombs of extraordinary massive-
ness. At Villers-aux-Bois the French buried
2,500 of those who were killed in winning
the Vimy Ridge. On each grave, at the
foot of its wooden cross, there is still stuck
in the earth, neck downwards, the bottle in
which the first hasty record of the interment
was placed. A tmy chapel at one end shelters
the Christ brought from the ruined Calvary
of Carency, and a little coloured image of
the Virgin riddled with German bullet-holes.
In all the cemeteries the Graves Registration
Units keep the graves, British and French,
in repair ; they sow grass and plant flowers
and shrubs, under the advice of the Head-
quarters of British gardening at Kew. A
few of these places are already gay with

13

autumn flowers in full bloom. More will
be brightened m this way next year, when
all the arrears of tidying and restoration
that the units found waiting for them have
been overtaken.

Outside the cemeteries themselves an im-
mense amount of work is done. The staffs
of the units are constantly searching all possible
and almost impossible places for isolated
graves that may have escaped registration.
The Directorate answers every enquiry* sent
by a soldier's friends, and will, if they wish,
take a photograph of a grave and send it to
them, for nothing, thanks to the funds pro-
vided for this purpose by the Joint War
Committee of the British Red Cross Society
and St. John's Ambulance. The Director
and his officers co-operate with the French
engineers, sanitary authorities and communal
councils in making arrangements to take

'^ All enquiries should be by letter, addressed to : —
Director of Graves Registration and Enquiries,
War Office, Winchester House,

St. James's Square,

London, S.W.

14

advantage of the noble and moving gift made
by the French nation on December 29th.,
1915, when the law was passed which ac-
quires for ever, in the name of the French
Government, the special cemeteries where
most of our dead in France are buried.

No money is wasted, and no energy is
diverted that might have been spent in
fighting ; all the officers of the units are
men disqualified by age, or other disability,
for combatant service ; the other ranks are
filled with men permanently relegated, through
cige, wounds, or sickness, to duty behind the
front. But much of the work is done under
fire. One officer, Captain J. D. Macdonald,
has already been killed on duty, and two others
and several men wounded.

In all wars it has been one of the fears
haunting a soldier's friends that his body
m^ay be utterly lost. Even in this war there
have been such irretrievable losses. But in
no great war has so much been done as in
this, to prevent the addition of that special
torment to the pains of anxiety and of
bereavement.

Printed in Great Britain by
Eyre & Spottiswoode, Ltd., East Harding Street, London, E.C.

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